1. Technical Field:
The present invention relates to telecommunication services and in particular to a system for providing subscribers of a telecommunications service with intelligence data.
2. Description of the Related Art:
Businesses are continually seeking ways to improve their businesses and increase sales volumes. Marketing plays a significant role in this regard, and as such, techniques have been developed for analyzing the various markets served by a business. For instance, a Telephone Company may assign multiple virtual phone numbers to a customer for use in different advertisements. When any of these virtual numbers are called, the calls are redirected to a primary number unbeknownst to the caller. However, the telephone company can track the calls made to each virtual number or track number that is used solely for the advertisement and then issue a report to the company of factors such as the volume of calls and the geographic locations from which the calls were received. This report can be used by marketing personnel to determine which ads were most effective, where to advertise, and how much to spend on future advertising. Although the virtual number may be different from the company""s regular business number or billing number, the call is generally routed to the same office. Such a system avoids the need for the company to ask how the customer learned of the company.
Currently, these types of intelligence gathering services are only provided by telephone companies because only the telephone companies have access to the infrastructure needed to perform this type of intelligence gathering. Thus, a company that does not have such an infrastructure is unable to provide this service to its customers. It would be desirable to provide such a company with a means by which it could provide intelligence data to its customers without requiring large capital investments in developing the required infrastructure necessary to provide the service. In this manner, any company desiring to provide the service to its customers may analyze the call detail records for a particular customer in order to provide the reports desired by the customer.
The present invention provides customers with telecommunications intelligence including geographical location, distribution, busy calls, answered calls, call duration, new callers, frequency of calls, etc. which may be in the form of call management reports. When a call is made to a customer of the service provided herein, a call detail record is created using the Telephone Company""s Advanced Intelligent Network (AIN). Each call that is made to the customer is processed using AIN service logic programs (SLPs). The SLP is invoked by an AIN trigger that is applied to the track telephone number(s) of the customers that subscribe to this service. For each inbound call, the SLP records several pieces of identifying information in a call detail record. Periodically, the AIN application accumulates the call detail records for all customers subscribing to the service. The information is processed to retrieve the desired data from the call detail records, and the data retrieved is used to develop call management reports for each customer subscribing to the service. Then the call management reports are sent to the customer using the preferred method of transmitting this information.
In a preferred embodiment of the present invention, a third party provider that may not have the infrastructure to collect call detail records may contract with a Telephone Company that is capable of collecting call detail records through its AIN to provide these detail records so that intelligence data may be provided to the customers of the third party provider. In this manner, a third party provider can now harvest information from the Telephone Company in order to provide such a service to its customers. The Telephone Company then bills the third party provider for the collection of the call detail records. The third party provider may be a data processing company that processes the call detail records to generate call management reports. Thus, the present invention allows third party providers that do not have the necessary infrastructure to implement the invention to use the infrastructure of a telephone company to provide the advantages of the present invention.